Page:The London Guide and Stranger's Safeguard.djvu/146

130 from these among whom they constantly dwell, and upon whom they hourly make prey.

Your charity is implored for the most abject looking beings that crawl the earth; and will vou not bestow it? I answer NO! not at midnight; not when some latent purpose is in view; when the scowl that meets your eye, huddles together all the derelictions consequent upon an early initiation in vice and crime. Is there no means of reclamation? asks the abstract moralist: YES! it has been attempted upon a large and benevolent scale. Individuals, too, have exerted their individual beneficence; but the incorrigible wretches, with their adventitious cleanness, seek anew for fresh debaucheries, and spread wider and wider the impurities inseparable from an early initiation in "the way of life, as it is called, quaintly enough. Notwithstanding this new surface, with which chance has covered their native garb of pollution, the original ground work—the centrical alloy, still remains: no less vitiation of principle, nor less of pestilence exists, because, wiih a flimsy covering of new cotton, and the emblazoned whoredom of painted cheeks, the poison dazzles the eye, while the understanding is thrown into the shade. Look closer,